The $2.19 Billion That Fell to $1,793 a Month
Published October 15, 2026
Blast, the Ethereum layer-2 network that once held $2.19 billion in user deposits, announced on October 2, 2026 that it is shutting down — its monthly revenue had collapsed to $1,793 while operating costs kept running. Ten days later, its sibling project, the NFT marketplace Blur, announced its own website shutdown for November 12. Both were founded by engineer Tieshun Roquerre, known as "Pacman," who has now wound down two crypto ventures within a fortnight.
On October 2, 2026, the team behind Blast announced the Ethereum layer-2 network was shutting down, and on October 12 its sibling project, the NFT marketplace Blur, said its website would go dark on November 12, with its Blend lending service halting new loans the same day. The two projects shared a founder — the engineer Tieshun Roquerre, better known online as "Pacman" — and their shutdowns landed within a fortnight of each other, closing out two of the louder experiments of the crypto boom's later chapters.
The scale of the collapse is best told in two numbers. Blast attracted a record $2.19 billion in total value locked in May 2024, according to DeFiLlama data reported by TheStreet, with revenue peaking at $3.54 million in June 2024. By September 2026, deposits had fallen to $24.81 million and monthly revenue to $1,793 — a rounding error on a network that still had to pay to keep its infrastructure alive. Blur's arc rhymes: once the largest marketplace for trading Ethereum NFTs, it peaked at $1.43 billion in trading volume in March 2023, then slid to less than $7 million by March 2026.
Roquerre's résumé reads like the canonical crypto-founder story. He worked as an engineer at the e-commerce site Teespring, dropped out of high school, co-founded the job-hunting site StrongIntro through the Y Combinator accelerator, studied mathematics and computer science at MIT from 2016 to 2018, and left to build on blockchain technology. He raised $5 million for the decentralized-domain startup Namebase in 2018 and sold it to Namecheap in 2021. He co-founded Blur in October 2022 and launched Blast the following November, catching the tail of the NFT mania that had seen a Beeple artwork sell for $69.3 million and Jack Dorsey's first tweet go for over $2.9 million.
What killed both projects wasn't a hack or a scandal but the simplest math in business: costs that don't fall when revenue does. Blast's team said operating costs had exceeded revenue, making continued operations unsustainable — a network still has to pay to stay alive even when hardly anyone is transacting on it. Both ventures were built to capture speculative capital, and when that capital found other avenues after the 2021–22 peak, the fees that funded everything evaporated. Incentive programs can rent liquidity; they can't keep it.
Users aren't losing their underlying assets: Blast asked users to withdraw to the Ethereum mainnet by October 26, after which they'll need to interact directly with bridge contracts on Ethereum's base layer. But the broader ledger is sobering — billions in paper value flowed through two platforms that are now being switched off, and the people who built their crypto lives around them are being told, politely, to pack up.
A peak number on a dashboard isn't wealth — it only counts once you can get it out. Blast's $2.19 billion was never money in a vault; it was deposits sitting in a venue, and the venue is closing. The same lesson applies far beyond crypto: if the value you think you have depends on someone else's platform staying open, it isn't fully yours yet.
The lesson: A peak number on a dashboard isn't wealth — it only counts once you can get it out.
Source: original reporting · How we source stories